Tuesday, June 7, 2016

MaxScholar - TOS Review

I consider reading to be a fundamental skill in our learning. At times I find it more challenging to work on this as the student gets older. I was excited to have an opportunity for J to review MaxScholar Reading Intervention Programs from MaxScholar. We reviewed the MaxGuru portion of the program.

MaxScholar is a comprehensive, multi-sensory, reading and language-based program. This is an online program focusing on learning to read or improving reading. MaxScholar states that the program can improve grade levels in just 30 hours.

We received a one year license for this program. J was the primary user for this review. He is a good reader but I was interested in how this would improve his reading specifically looking at highlighting and gleaning the important information from the reading. We used MaxGuru and focused on MaxReading which improves reading comprehension and introduces the concepts of highlighting, summarising, and outlining a text.

It was easy to set up a student account. I do like the fact that the student has their own account. J found it easy to login and do his work. There is also a teacher section. The one thing that I needed to remember was that this was a different web address for reports. There does not appear to be a link on the main website to the parents site. That is just one of the things that you need to remember. I did find the reports helpful especially as I just allowed J to work on this on his own. I was able to see what he has done and his scores.

At the beginning there is a pre-test. I am not sure if J didn't know exactly what was expected on the test but he scored a bit lower than I thought. That surprised me as the pre-test was about a place that he has visited, Hong Kong.

This was something that J was able to do on his own. I assigned it to be done three to four times a week. It took him about 20-30 minutes per lesson.

I asked his opinion and thoughts about MaxReading and this is some of what he had to say about the program.

"The layout is the best I have seen for an online program."

"The information was good with lots of different subjects."

"I learned stuff."

I asked him how he thought it helped him and some of his comments were the following.

"I thought I was faster at reading and his comprehension was better."

"I learned to look for the important things when reading."

I"t helped to see what you need to know and remember."

"I learned to pull out the important parts."

One comment that he had just a fact that he observed, was that it was difficult to get an A+ and that was primarily because of the highlighting.

I think the program did what I thought it would do for J in helping him to learn to outline, summarise, and look for the important information. I think that is a skill necessary for university and further study.

There is much more to MaxScholar than just MaxReading. There is also MaxPhonics for teaching reading. Reviews for both programs can be found with the link below.